“A Source of Hope Online”: Membership Curation by Staff to Protect Guarded Cliques Limits Access to Resources for Marginalized Communities on Discord CSCW002

The Discord platform allows marginalized people access to critical communities and resources unavailable elsewhere. Discord server staff often protect these communities through membership curation , which encompasses acts intended to deny or gate server access to certain users. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we interviewed fourteen Discord staff members to better understand the tensions between membership curation and open access to communities and resources. We found that excessive curation promotes a pattern of insular, atomized guarded cliques , which jeopardizes access to critical Discord spaces for marginalized users who clash with cultural or group norms, sometimes translating into severe offline harms. We determined that membership curation often functions as resistance against cultural change, and it is also used to minimize the need for active moderation. Based on these findings, we offer a series of transferable design recommendations and best practices for both the Discord platform and for server staff.